Back To The Moon

An Apolloistic interview with Bill Posey. I really hate this sort of thing:

Going to the Moon again would be exciting, but NASA’s already-minuscule budget (a mere $18.5 billion in 2016, compared to $585 billion for the Department of Defense) means that the agency can probably only afford one big dream at a time. Do we go back to the Moon or do we press ahead on visiting Mars? Right now, Mars is winning by a landslide. For the last few years NASA has been focused on its Journey to Mars, with no plans to send people back to the Moon.

“This bill proposes not just a visit to the Moon but a presence on the lunar surface,” Casey Dreier, space policy expert at the Planetary Society, told Motherboard. “This isn’t wrong by any means, but it’s one of those things that if you do this, you just won’t go to Mars for a long time.”

In fact, if we changed course from the Journey to Mars to Journey Back to the Moon, we might not see footprints on Mars in our lifetime. “It would put us back at least a generation,” Dreier said.

a) There is, and should be, no relationship between the NASA budget and the Pentagon (or any other agency’s) budget. Each agency’s budget request has to stand on its own. And b) as usual, note the assumption that we have to choose between one destination or the other. Some people, including the so-called experts, cannot conceive of the possibility of doing both.

Also note the implicit assumption of the next question:

Motherboard: Given NASA’s already underfunded budget, do you think it would be worth abandoning a mission to Mars to go back to the Moon? [Emphasis added]

It’s a matter of prioritization, and we’ve asked NASA to prepare a roadmap of what steps they’re going to take in a timeline given current funding, for increased funding or decreased funding. What steps are you going to take to get to the Moon? They have discovered there are resources on the Moon that they can make fuel out of, you know launching from the Moon, you can see many, many reasons why it’s good to have a Moon base. And that’s part of the process of getting to Mars. It’s been awhile since we’ve been on the Moon and we’ve had some technology to catch up on and practice so those are all important.

And note the omission in the next response:

I’m excited about any private industry that plans on doing any space exploration. One time NASA came up with a series of different ideas, they would touch an asteroid, land on an asteroid, then it changed to a bigger mission and then smaller mission but there was no tie-in to a Mars mission. A lot of the private sector are ready, willing and able to explore and mine asteroids so that we don’t need to do it. Anything that you can find in the phonebook that the private sector is doing, the government doesn’t really need to be doing. Exploring an asteroid is one of those things.

Hey, Bill, did you know that the private sector is interested in mining the moon, too?

And here comes the Apolloism:

Motherboard: Do you have a special memory from working on Apollo 11 that you’d like for the next generation to experience?

What inspired me so much was President Kennedy’s speech from Rice University, that was so inspiring to me when he said we’re going to put a rocket on the Moon. I wanted to go to work on that rocket and have my fingerprints on that rocket that takes men to the Moon. So that was a big inspiration for me and I think returning to the Moon will also re-engage the public’s interest in the space program and inspire a new generation of American students to study engineering and mathematics where we currently lag behind other students in competing nations.

Motherboard: How do you see NASA handling itself as we move forward between finally choosing between going back to the Moon or going straight to Mars?

We’ve spent somewhere between $20-24 billion on what we call “missions to nowhere” and we can’t do that again. The NASA budget is now about one half of one percent [of the GDP]. During the Apollo era it was 4 percent of the GDP, I would love to see it at 1 percent. Neil deGrasse Tyson explained very well one time, space is the only thing that Congress spends money on truly to benefit the next generation, and I think that’s a true statement. I’d like to see congress spend 1 percent, I’d even like to see a constitutional amendment requiring that 1 percent be spent on human space exploration each year so that we will have the survival of our species.

With all respect to Neil Tyson (OK, I don’t have that much) it’s mindless to have an arbitrary percentage of the federal budget for anything, let alone NASA. The only way to determine how much budget NASA should get is to decide what it’s going to do, come up with a set of plans to do that, and estimate the costs. Right now, I’d say that NASA has plenty of money, or would if people like Bill Posey didn’t force it to waste money on a giant rocket and capsule that it doesn’t need, in order for him to revisit his lost youth. The three billion a year that he’s forcing the agency to spend on SLS/Orion would go a long way, perhaps all the way, both a lunar return and a Mars mission in the next decade (with public/private parterships using Commercial Cargo and Crew as a model) if NASA was allowed to spend it instead on things it actually needs to do both those things

32 thoughts on “Back To The Moon”

  1. I have to agree on the moon is a distraction. The British made the same mistake when they tried to colonize Virginia in 1607. There was no fresh water there during a drought and everybody died. Virginia is simply not a viable destination for a human colony, and it was over two decades of lost opportunities before the British set their sights on Massachusetts, a colony that is still thriving. Of course one day we might settle Virginia, but it’s important to realize that we can’t do multiple colonies at once. We have to stay focused.

    1. Actually, Virgina was a excellent place, but they consistently chose poor sites. Big difference.

      Lots of fresh water there if you know where to look…

  2. I find it quite interesting that, today, a “Back to the moon” manned lunar flyby was announced, for next year. By SpaceX. I love it! (apparently no taxpayer funding for the mission – it’s private buyers, so it’s wonderful!)

    And, purely coincidentally I’m sure, isn’t this SpaceX mission basically the “Manned EM-1” first SLS mission NASA’s talking about for SLS in a few years? For many billions?

    1. Extremely clever marketing on SpaceX’s part. If a two-person ’round-the-moon’ trip is successful, this puts pressure on NASA to keep the ‘crewed mission requirements & certification hoo-hah’ on the “moneyball” ISS taxi missions to something reasonable and appropriate. It also prevents requirements creep from forestalling such crewed missions. OTOH if this trip ends in disaster, well, it just might doom Dragon 2. It’s called risk management.

      1. SpaceX would have subsidized this trip had not someone come forward first with cash in hand. It’s just good marketing.

      2. You’re right about the potential for a disaster to 86 the crewed Dragon. Such an event may well be part of the backstory to my short story Phoenix Dreams, in which it’s been three decades since anyone’s traveled beyond Earth’s atmosphere and Toni learns about the Apollo lunar landings and the Space Shuttle era only by accident, when she finds a cache of videos while visiting her grandfather’s ranch.

      3. SpaceX should send Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. They make excellent passengers who don’t mind if they don’t make it all the way to the destination.

      4. In ages past, loss of ship and crew would be approached soberly, lessons would be learned, and another attempt would be made. Risk and loss were acknowledged parts of exploration and progress. Today, we are paralyzed by risk, and go catatonic with loss. And progress grinds slow.

        1. To put it lightly. Been re-reading The Right Stuff recently. The number of test pilots we lost was just staggering.

  3. This statement:

    “Motherboard: Given NASA’s already underfunded budget, do you think it would be worth abandoning a mission to Mars to go back to the Moon? [Emphasis added]”

    …..shows so clearly that they have no real rationale for doing anything. They just want to GO SOMEWHERE.

    They are not saying, “We need to go to the Moon (or Mars or anywhere else ) instead of any other place for *these reasons*.”

  4. “Right now, I’d say that NASA has plenty of money, or would if people like Bill Posey didn’t force it to waste money on a giant rocket and capsule that it doesn’t need, in order for him to revisit his lost youth. The three billion a year that he’s forcing the agency to spend on SLS/Orion would go a long way, perhaps all the way, both a lunar return and a Mars mission in the next decade (with public/private parterships using Commercial Cargo and Crew as a model) if NASA was allowed to spend it instead on things it actually needs to do both those things”

    Ok but as I’m sure you know, if they canceled SLS/Orion right now, that money doesn’t necessarily stay in NASA’s pot. In fact it almost certainly wouldn’t since you are breaking several rice bowls.

  5. The fact that this story didn’t survive contact with a single day says something exciting about the times we are finalally living in.

    I had a sneaking suspicion that Musk would eventually steal those customers from the Russians.

    Yay us!

      1. Free butter (and housing, phones, food, utilities etc) is what destroyed the black family (see the Moynihan Report of 1965) while guns are tools of self defense. So no, I don’t see.

  6. There never was a #JourneyToMars, so going to the Moon isn’t changing anything except the listless goals and objectives given NASA. Going to the Moon isn’t being driven by NASA, it is being driven by the ESA, China, and other countries that want to build lunar bases. America isn’t leading, but following.

    We should participate in the efforts of the ESA and our other partners but we should only offer to participate not carry the majority of the burden. If ESA wants to build a lunar village, we should have a room in it not build the entire complex.

    There are so many different actors that want to go to different destinations. By focusing the lionshare of our public/private partnerships on creating, enabling, and controlling the space based equivalent of ports and shipping lanes we not only enable people to choose their own destination but create long term influence for our culture and the ability for our citizens and companies to profit from it.

    The more places people go, the more places researchers can tag along, the more money generated for profit and taxes.

    1. I would be in favor of the United States controlling the spaceships that take other countries to their lunar bases, but I would also be in favor of our having our own lunar base.

      1. I would like to see those ships being American in terms of construction and/or operation by American companies and individuals. Same with any space station or lunar base.

        I don’t think we can get away with not participating in the ESA lunar village but that shouldn’t be the only thing going on for American citizens or our government workers.

    1. A– free return trajectory loop around the Moon is not the same as going into lunar orbit, the way the crew of Apollo 8 did back in 1968.

      Space X really should be focused on safely and routinely deploy American astronauts into orbit.

      IMO, its really a waste of a good heavy lift vehicle to use the SLS for crewed beyond LEO missions. Using the SLS to deploy large Deep Space Habitats and propellant depots to EML1 would make much more sense.

      The money spent on the Orion would have been much better spent developing a reusable single stage lunar lander that could have also been used as a reusable orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) between propellant depots located at LEO and EML1.

      Marcel

      1. The money spent on the Orion would have been much better spent developing a reusable single stage lunar lander that could have also been used as a reusable orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) between propellant depots located at LEO and EML1.

        Absolutely. No question about it.

  7. The SpaceX announcement is audacious and daring, the sort of thing NASA used to do. If this flight succeeds, the band-aid will be ripped away and the waste of CxP and SLS laid bare for all to see. It won’t be pretty. It’s difficult for me to see how SLS survives a successful Dragon lunar flyby. That said, the bureaucratic inertia of SLS is so great that I expect it will die only by sunsetting the program after at least 3 of the 4 flights for which SSMEs exist actually fly, ensuring SLS funding for another 10 years or so. I have much greater doubt that a fully functional Orion will ever fly, and I expect EM-1 to occur as currently envisioned (no crew) in 2019 or so.

    1. I’d sunset it tomorrow if I could, and move the savings over to lander and lunar surface systems development – and not all of it on FAR contracts, either.

      But perhaps that won’t be possible even after Elon does his lunar flight.

      Maybe we have to (as you say) give it three or four flights to use up the SSME’s and save face for certain senators, as you suggest. So we let it do its EM-1 test flight; convert EM-2 to use its lift capacity to send a hab to cislunar space – SLS Block IB’s TLI payload capability could put two (2) Bigelow 330’s into lunar orbit or a Lagrange point, with the EUS used to maneuver it into place, and use the remaining two SLS’s to do Culberson’s Europa missions he so desperately wants. After that, everything else we do in cislunar space takes a ride on a Falcon Heavy or a New Glenn, and whatever iterations succeed them. And NASA stays out of the launch business for good.

      1. One problem being that the savings are not likely to be moved over to lunar lander and surface systems development. They are much more likely to be scattered around between half a dozen different federal agencies doing who knows what, to no discernible effect.

        1. That’s true.

          And I think this is why NASA’s HSF P.O.R. needs to move back to being program-oriented, rather than capability oriented.

          “Let’s build a permanent base on the moon supported by and supporting in turn a lunar commercial infrastructure delivering lunar ice-derived water, air, and fuel, and do it within a decade.” NASA figures out the cheapest way to do it, using commercial contractors for much of the logistics, and gives the quote to Congress.

          Otherwise, you can’t justify the lander. Unless it’s for the jobs. Maybe Huntsville could develop that instead. That might help sell it to the likes of Dick Shelby.

  8. I’ve seen a lot of “mars vs. moon” arguments, but what about Plan C? That is, why not focus on a earth orbit presence in the short term? You’ve already achieved escape velocity (more or less) and anything after that is “just” a change in orbit, no?

    On the other hand this possibly ignores the asteroid belt…

  9. Whatever they decide does not matter. The next administration will just come in and toss it all away again. Our government is suffering from ADD. It can no longer accomplish big projects.

    The only way we are ever going to get back to the Moon or beyond to Mars is A) if another space-faring nation initiates a competition that focuses the will, B) if the private sector can manage it.

      1. Assuming red Dragons on mars by 2020 (and each window thereafter) all sorts of commercial customers, that couldn’t otherwise, will be able to include small robotic packages to investigate whatever they like on mars.

        That same type of Dragon would allow humans to eventually follow. It becomes a fairly unremarkable transportation system at that point.

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